7 ms·

It's surprising because car drivers are used to the fact that rules are not or rarely enforced. Just think about it: Technically it would be no big problem to

by hannob 6y ago

It's surprising because car drivers are used to the fact that rules are not or rarely enforced. Just think about it: Technically it would be no big problem to enforce speed limits widely. The technology for speeding cameras isn't exceptionally complex, you could mass-produce them and deploy them basically in every street. I'm not aware of any country doing that.

hansvm 6y ago
We'd probably need a few other societal changes to make automatic enforcement of the posted speed limit manageable. As an example, if you're on a 50mph road in the USA and assume that your speedometer is calibrated within legal tolerances (and no further) then you'd have to set your cruise control to at most 43mph to ensure that you'd never speed (5mph speedometer error at that speed plus 2mph in speed variability from bumps/hills/etc), you could actually be averaging as low as 39mph in practice, and somebody else behind you with a speedometer off the other direction could think you're going as slowly as 35mph (on average, slower from time to time). I can say from experience that doing so is an easy way to be flipped off, sworn at, passed on the shoulder or a sidewalk, and have police called to your location (occasionally driving the speed limit plus 0-10mph results in similar levels of aggression), even though you can potentially be ticketed for going even a mile per hour faster (most police forces allow a lot more slop in your speed for precisely that kind of reason, but there are definitely a few who don't give a shit because they know you don't want to drive all the way back to the middle of nowhere to fight it) and even though driving that slowly is totally legal in most places. None of that is insurmountable of course, and the easiest fix seems like just having the automated system only ticket you at some threshold above the limit while grandfathering in tighter speedometer tolerances. Aggression from driving the speed limit would probably decrease rapidly as tickets started arriving in the mail.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Technically it would be no big problem to enforce speed limits widely More than you suggest. > The technology for speeding cameras isn't exceptionally complex But speed cameras are just one piece of enforcement. With those and automatic license plate reading you get a piece of evidence that a car violated the limit at a particular time and place, but even if the law is that a set limit is a hard limit (which is not the case in much of the US, where posted limits are often prima facie but not dispositive limits), that's not all you need for enforcement. You also need legal process to weigh potential counterevidence, to deal with contested identity of actual drivers, etc. This isn't technically complex, but it adds a lot of overhead, which is why even places which legally allow this mechanism deploy it selectively, not comprehensively.
telotortium 6y ago
Maybe not in the US, but in both France and China, to name two countries I've been to, speed cameras were obvious on the highways and actually sent out fines.
- hannob 6y ago
  There's a difference between having a speeding camera every now and then on the highway or consistently enforcing speeding limits. I don't have a statistic on this, but my gut feeling would be most speeding happens in residential areas with low speed limit, and enforcement in many places is basically nonexistent.
  - ianai 6y ago
    In my experience, speeding is prolific and not tied to speed limit. I’ve read it’s actually tied to visual or physical cues the driver perceives as making speeding riskier or safer. Narrower lanes or walls are associated with slower speeds.
choeger 6y ago
The same holds for a lot of other rules, from public transportation tickets over legal fireworks and drinking age to softer drugs and taxes. Society as a whole seems to be generally fine with smaller infractions and I consider this a good thing, tbh. I would be perfectly fine with a similar scheme for traffic laws. The thing with speeding cameras is that they could easily be adjusted to allow for 20% (say at most 20kph) margin (which would be perfectly fine for me even on the German Autobahn), but drivers would learn that fact and adjust perfectly to just 1kph below that limit. This would then enrage puritans that would DEMAND that these MURDERES be PUNISHED. Sadly for some reason traffic law is an area of zero tolerance for some.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Unsafe driving is a real cause of a substantial amount of death, and unlike most causes of death it is not over represented in the elderly, giving it a massively outsized impact in terms of reduction in expected years of life. Motor vehicle collisions are reliably the leading cause of death of teenagers and young adults in many parts of the world. People are bad at appraising events that are rare with high negative impact, so most people, who have never experienced the consequences of unsafe (or drunk) driving consider it a minor issue.
  - choeger 6y ago
    Unsafe driving is not characterized by speeding a slight margin over the limit on good roads (see German Autobahn for statistics, these are among the safest roads on the planet). Similarly, I am pretty certain that driving 40 in a 30 zone (when 30 is safely possible) is not the cause of most, if any, deaths. Causes are varied, but generally the situations where one or two meters of road would make a difference are obviously rare. So to emphasize my point: Permanent and ubiquitous speed control is the wet dream of many people, but it's a proxy. These people have a problem with cars. And there are many places where that is absolutely justified (dense inner cities for example, or streets in front of schools).
    - Symbiote 6y ago
orangeshark 6y ago
See red light cameras. You recieve a ticket through the mail and you get pictures and a video of the violation. There is a lot of people against it and some governments have legistation against the use of it.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  I thought that was mainly because red light cameras often lead to an increase in collisions because a driver is more likely to stop unsafely if they are worried about the light changing
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    Which is, in turn, caused by the unsafe shortening of the yellow light commonly used in combination with red light cameras in order to maximize ticket revenue. Because with an adequately timed yellow light, few people actually run the red light and the cameras become an expensive money pit that can't pay for themselves.
    - davchana 6y ago
      In India, on some newer signals in last 5-6 years, I have seen that when Red is on, & is going to go to Green, the Red will start blinking in last 5 or so seconds. Then Green will be ON. When Green is ON, & is going to switch off, it will start blinking & then off, & then yellow will start blinking. Its ok to drive through blinking green or yellow if safe. But common training os drive through blinking Green, but if you see blinking Yellow, then stop. Plus, some of the lights have counter. It shows how many seconds are remaining for the lit color. An experiment led the Bombay Municipality to install Noise Sensors are one busy traffic light with counter. Every time there is a Red Light, & counter is less than 10, normally people start getting impatient & start honking to force the front ones to move. But on this light, if the noise is above certain decibel while Red, the counter resets.
  - 0xCMP 6y ago
    IIRC there was also the argument that since an officer hadn't seen the crime committed it did not hold or something. I recall hearing about legal cases which made the city I was in disable and then remove them because they became useless after the rulings.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> The technology for speeding cameras Speed cameras are not the go-to tech. Nearly every car on the road has a GPS, either organic to the vehicle or inside the driver's phone. If we wanted to actually enforce speed limits it would be a trivial matter to have google forward the relevant information. This was done by a few rental car companies many moons ago (circa 2001). Speeding laws don't know how to account for such data. Should someone speeding continuously over many miles be fined more or less than someone who speeds twice, each time only for a short distance? Traffic laws are premised on the systems by which people are caught (cops, traffic cameras etc). They are not adapted to the perfect knowledge that modern tech can provide. https://www.drivers.com/article/428/ https://www.drivers.com/article/428/ Of course, if we really care, it would be trivial to limit all cars to a particular speed while on public roads. Japanese motorcycles are already limited by industry agreement, iirc 300kph (see the Hyabusa fiasco). Merc/BMW cars are limited to 250kph. Those limit could be lowered via a simple software patch.
- hansvm 6y ago
  That brings back memories of Pokemon Go issuing bans after flights because you must be location spoofing to have travelled that quickly. On some level, a device owned and controlled by the consumer and asserting a particular travel speed seems like the wrong place to put that kind of enforcement.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > If we wanted to actually enforce speed limits it would be a trivial matter to have google forward the relevant information. So then you get a speeding fine for being a passenger? Wouldn't people just turn off their phones? > Of course, if we really care, it would be trivial to limit all cars to a particular mas speed while on public roads. This is useless because most "speeding" would be within the limit for the country, e.g. there are places in the US with a speed limit of 85 MPH, whereas most of the problem is really people driving 70 in a 45. And trying to enforce the actual speed limit on the specific road would be fragile and dangerous because if your vehicle detects the limit wrong it could force you to drive 30+MPH below the flow of traffic and cause an accident.
PurpleFoxy 6y ago
An interesting method that is widely used in Australia is “average speed cameras”. They set up 2 sets of cameras on a long highway and then time how long it took you to get from one camera to the next. It’s an excellent idea because you can’t just slow down for the camera and then speed up again.
- endymi0n 6y ago
  I‘ve seen them in the Netherlands as well. These are pretty great as they completely discourage any form of cheating that is dangerous (i.e. sudden braking), but incentivize smooth flowing traffic.
- nikau 6y ago
  A friend told me of a similar system which I think was in Malaysia, but some vendors setup food stalls at the side of the road before the exit cameras where people would stop and get a meal to extend their drive time.
- theluketaylor 6y ago
  Average speed cameras seem unbelievably dangerous to me. I haven't ever driven somewhere with them, but I suspect all I'd be thinking about was the speed limit, resulting in very dangerous driving. With all my focus on making to correct average I'd fail to properly track other drivers and potential hazards. I'm much happier with a flow of traffic enforcement. Ticket those who speed excessively beyond what traffic is generally flowing and let the posted limit be more of a guideline.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    If you're trying to game the detection system to minimize travel time then average speed cameras could encourage pathological behavior (which would hopefully also be caught by careless/reckless driving laws). They're dead-simple and not subject to cosine error and sensitive closed-source calibration techniques though. Even accounting for clock skew and clock drift, if an average speed camera says you were going x+2ϵ mph then it's safe to say you were going at least x+ϵ mph for at least some small interval and some very small value of ϵ.
davchana 6y ago
Absolutely correct about the technology. Qatar is doing that. I lived in Qatar for 7 years, drove a car. All speed cameras are not visible. Some are marked with sign boards, but many are hidden permanently on a lamp post, or in a palm tree, or in anything. There are even mobile cameras, which an operator puts on a heavy tripod, & goes away, & camera takes photos of offenders & send back to data centre. Cameras are on highways, on streets, on intersections. Every traffic signal has built in camera. Fines go up progressively with each offense & over the limit. Owner of car gets a mobile notification as soon as his car speeds in front of camera. All fines are payable fully at yearly registration. If paid in some x days, there is a discount.On Holy Month of Ramadan also sometimes there is a discount. The biggest is, there is no need of a man standing behind camera. Two photos taken apart a second or such are the proof. Owner can only contest it if he has gps recordings. Speed limit is speed limit. No +5 or +10. But then, fine amount stings only if they are enough. For an expat like me, a fine of $200 is a lot. For a local Qatari 20ish year boy, thats nothing. Some of my photography club members had fines in tunes of $2500 a year, & totally normal.
- nikau 6y ago
  > Owner of car gets a mobile notification as soon as his car speeds in front of camera. So they have another camera about 20 seconds up the road to catch them reading SMS while driving?
  - davchana 6y ago
    Lol no, most of the times, either Employer/Companies, Rental/Lease Companies, or Fathers are the owners. The users/drivers are employees, or family members.

by hannob 6y ago

hansvm 6y ago

We'd probably need a few other societal changes to make automatic enforcement of the posted speed limit manageable. As an example, if you're on a 50mph road in the USA and assume that your speedometer is calibrated within legal tolerances (and no further) then you'd have to set your cruise control to at most 43mph to ensure that you'd never speed (5mph speedometer error at that speed plus 2mph in speed variability from bumps/hills/etc), you could actually be averaging as low as 39mph in practice, and somebody else behind you with a speedometer off the other direction could think you're going as slowly as 35mph (on average, slower from time to time). I can say from experience that doing so is an easy way to be flipped off, sworn at, passed on the shoulder or a sidewalk, and have police called to your location (occasionally driving the speed limit plus 0-10mph results in similar levels of aggression), even though you can potentially be ticketed for going even a mile per hour faster (most police forces allow a lot more slop in your speed for precisely that kind of reason, but there are definitely a few who don't give a shit because they know you don't want to drive all the way back to the middle of nowhere to fight it) and even though driving that slowly is totally legal in most places. None of that is insurmountable of course, and the easiest fix seems like just having the automated system only ticket you at some threshold above the limit while grandfathering in tighter speedometer tolerances. Aggression from driving the speed limit would probably decrease rapidly as tickets started arriving in the mail.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Technically it would be no big problem to enforce speed limits widely More than you suggest. > The technology for speeding cameras isn't exceptionally complex But speed cameras are just one piece of enforcement. With those and automatic license plate reading you get a piece of evidence that a car violated the limit at a particular time and place, but even if the law is that a set limit is a hard limit (which is not the case in much of the US, where posted limits are often prima facie but not dispositive limits), that's not all you need for enforcement. You also need legal process to weigh potential counterevidence, to deal with contested identity of actual drivers, etc. This isn't technically complex, but it adds a lot of overhead, which is why even places which legally allow this mechanism deploy it selectively, not comprehensively.

telotortium 6y ago

Maybe not in the US, but in both France and China, to name two countries I've been to, speed cameras were obvious on the highways and actually sent out fines.

hannob 6y ago
There's a difference between having a speeding camera every now and then on the highway or consistently enforcing speeding limits. I don't have a statistic on this, but my gut feeling would be most speeding happens in residential areas with low speed limit, and enforcement in many places is basically nonexistent.
- ianai 6y ago
  In my experience, speeding is prolific and not tied to speed limit. I’ve read it’s actually tied to visual or physical cues the driver perceives as making speeding riskier or safer. Narrower lanes or walls are associated with slower speeds.

choeger 6y ago

The same holds for a lot of other rules, from public transportation tickets over legal fireworks and drinking age to softer drugs and taxes. Society as a whole seems to be generally fine with smaller infractions and I consider this a good thing, tbh. I would be perfectly fine with a similar scheme for traffic laws. The thing with speeding cameras is that they could easily be adjusted to allow for 20% (say at most 20kph) margin (which would be perfectly fine for me even on the German Autobahn), but drivers would learn that fact and adjust perfectly to just 1kph below that limit. This would then enrage puritans that would DEMAND that these MURDERES be PUNISHED. Sadly for some reason traffic law is an area of zero tolerance for some.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
Unsafe driving is a real cause of a substantial amount of death, and unlike most causes of death it is not over represented in the elderly, giving it a massively outsized impact in terms of reduction in expected years of life. Motor vehicle collisions are reliably the leading cause of death of teenagers and young adults in many parts of the world. People are bad at appraising events that are rare with high negative impact, so most people, who have never experienced the consequences of unsafe (or drunk) driving consider it a minor issue.
- choeger 6y ago
  Unsafe driving is not characterized by speeding a slight margin over the limit on good roads (see German Autobahn for statistics, these are among the safest roads on the planet). Similarly, I am pretty certain that driving 40 in a 30 zone (when 30 is safely possible) is not the cause of most, if any, deaths. Causes are varied, but generally the situations where one or two meters of road would make a difference are obviously rare. So to emphasize my point: Permanent and ubiquitous speed control is the wet dream of many people, but it's a proxy. These people have a problem with cars. And there are many places where that is absolutely justified (dense inner cities for example, or streets in front of schools).
  - Symbiote 6y ago

orangeshark 6y ago

See red light cameras. You recieve a ticket through the mail and you get pictures and a video of the violation. There is a lot of people against it and some governments have legistation against the use of it.

jtsiskin 6y ago
I thought that was mainly because red light cameras often lead to an increase in collisions because a driver is more likely to stop unsafely if they are worried about the light changing
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Which is, in turn, caused by the unsafe shortening of the yellow light commonly used in combination with red light cameras in order to maximize ticket revenue. Because with an adequately timed yellow light, few people actually run the red light and the cameras become an expensive money pit that can't pay for themselves.
  - davchana 6y ago
    In India, on some newer signals in last 5-6 years, I have seen that when Red is on, & is going to go to Green, the Red will start blinking in last 5 or so seconds. Then Green will be ON. When Green is ON, & is going to switch off, it will start blinking & then off, & then yellow will start blinking. Its ok to drive through blinking green or yellow if safe. But common training os drive through blinking Green, but if you see blinking Yellow, then stop. Plus, some of the lights have counter. It shows how many seconds are remaining for the lit color. An experiment led the Bombay Municipality to install Noise Sensors are one busy traffic light with counter. Every time there is a Red Light, & counter is less than 10, normally people start getting impatient & start honking to force the front ones to move. But on this light, if the noise is above certain decibel while Red, the counter resets.
- 0xCMP 6y ago
  IIRC there was also the argument that since an officer hadn't seen the crime committed it did not hold or something. I recall hearing about legal cases which made the city I was in disable and then remove them because they became useless after the rulings.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> The technology for speeding cameras Speed cameras are not the go-to tech. Nearly every car on the road has a GPS, either organic to the vehicle or inside the driver's phone. If we wanted to actually enforce speed limits it would be a trivial matter to have google forward the relevant information. This was done by a few rental car companies many moons ago (circa 2001). Speeding laws don't know how to account for such data. Should someone speeding continuously over many miles be fined more or less than someone who speeds twice, each time only for a short distance? Traffic laws are premised on the systems by which people are caught (cops, traffic cameras etc). They are not adapted to the perfect knowledge that modern tech can provide. https://www.drivers.com/article/428/ https://www.drivers.com/article/428/ Of course, if we really care, it would be trivial to limit all cars to a particular speed while on public roads. Japanese motorcycles are already limited by industry agreement, iirc 300kph (see the Hyabusa fiasco). Merc/BMW cars are limited to 250kph. Those limit could be lowered via a simple software patch.

hansvm 6y ago
That brings back memories of Pokemon Go issuing bans after flights because you must be location spoofing to have travelled that quickly. On some level, a device owned and controlled by the consumer and asserting a particular travel speed seems like the wrong place to put that kind of enforcement.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> If we wanted to actually enforce speed limits it would be a trivial matter to have google forward the relevant information. So then you get a speeding fine for being a passenger? Wouldn't people just turn off their phones? > Of course, if we really care, it would be trivial to limit all cars to a particular mas speed while on public roads. This is useless because most "speeding" would be within the limit for the country, e.g. there are places in the US with a speed limit of 85 MPH, whereas most of the problem is really people driving 70 in a 45. And trying to enforce the actual speed limit on the specific road would be fragile and dangerous because if your vehicle detects the limit wrong it could force you to drive 30+MPH below the flow of traffic and cause an accident.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago

An interesting method that is widely used in Australia is “average speed cameras”. They set up 2 sets of cameras on a long highway and then time how long it took you to get from one camera to the next. It’s an excellent idea because you can’t just slow down for the camera and then speed up again.

endymi0n 6y ago
I‘ve seen them in the Netherlands as well. These are pretty great as they completely discourage any form of cheating that is dangerous (i.e. sudden braking), but incentivize smooth flowing traffic.
nikau 6y ago
A friend told me of a similar system which I think was in Malaysia, but some vendors setup food stalls at the side of the road before the exit cameras where people would stop and get a meal to extend their drive time.
theluketaylor 6y ago
Average speed cameras seem unbelievably dangerous to me. I haven't ever driven somewhere with them, but I suspect all I'd be thinking about was the speed limit, resulting in very dangerous driving. With all my focus on making to correct average I'd fail to properly track other drivers and potential hazards. I'm much happier with a flow of traffic enforcement. Ticket those who speed excessively beyond what traffic is generally flowing and let the posted limit be more of a guideline.
- hansvm 6y ago
  If you're trying to game the detection system to minimize travel time then average speed cameras could encourage pathological behavior (which would hopefully also be caught by careless/reckless driving laws). They're dead-simple and not subject to cosine error and sensitive closed-source calibration techniques though. Even accounting for clock skew and clock drift, if an average speed camera says you were going x+2ϵ mph then it's safe to say you were going at least x+ϵ mph for at least some small interval and some very small value of ϵ.

davchana 6y ago

Absolutely correct about the technology. Qatar is doing that. I lived in Qatar for 7 years, drove a car. All speed cameras are not visible. Some are marked with sign boards, but many are hidden permanently on a lamp post, or in a palm tree, or in anything. There are even mobile cameras, which an operator puts on a heavy tripod, & goes away, & camera takes photos of offenders & send back to data centre. Cameras are on highways, on streets, on intersections. Every traffic signal has built in camera. Fines go up progressively with each offense & over the limit. Owner of car gets a mobile notification as soon as his car speeds in front of camera. All fines are payable fully at yearly registration. If paid in some x days, there is a discount.On Holy Month of Ramadan also sometimes there is a discount. The biggest is, there is no need of a man standing behind camera. Two photos taken apart a second or such are the proof. Owner can only contest it if he has gps recordings. Speed limit is speed limit. No +5 or +10. But then, fine amount stings only if they are enough. For an expat like me, a fine of $200 is a lot. For a local Qatari 20ish year boy, thats nothing. Some of my photography club members had fines in tunes of $2500 a year, & totally normal.

nikau 6y ago
> Owner of car gets a mobile notification as soon as his car speeds in front of camera. So they have another camera about 20 seconds up the road to catch them reading SMS while driving?
- davchana 6y ago
  Lol no, most of the times, either Employer/Companies, Rental/Lease Companies, or Fathers are the owners. The users/drivers are employees, or family members.